Announcing the release of Couchbase Server 1.8.1

Published
July 3, 2012

Customers continue to tell us that they love Couchbase for its “Always online” characteristic and consistent performance. As we make enhancements to Couchbase Server, we continue to focus on these strengths of our distributed database.

A key aspect of being always online is the ability to perform administrative tasks like database upgrades, operating system or hardware upgrades as well as resizing the cluster without taking the application down. In Couchbase Server this is achieved using the rebalance operation that updates the cluster topology and redistributes data uniformly across the cluster. (Multiple) nodes can be added or removed to perform maintenance on the cluster.

Rebalance improvements included in 1.8.1 optimize the movement of data when adding and removing the same number of nodes by moving data directly between the nodes being switched out. This enhancement puts customers in a position to proactively manage their application for all kinds of upgrades and maintenance reducing the impact on the rest of the cluster.

Management of the memory allocated within the system has been improved. This increases stability of the system as a whole. In addition to this, a few new memory usage statistics have been added to our monitoring console.

Several significant bugs related to rebalance and cluster stability have been fixed. The detailed release notes can be found here.

I recommend all our users to move to release 1.8.1. You can down it from our download page and the updated manual can be found here.